‘Pacific Rim 2′ Update: Guillermo del Toro Is Planning a Trilogy

Here's what we know so far: 'Pacific Rim 2' is scheduled to hit theaters in 2017, and director Guillermo del Toro has previously mentioned digging deeper into concepts like the Drift and the portal which allowed the Kaiju to enter our world. That's it! That's all we know. But now there's more: the director has spoken again, this time teasing plans for a trilogy.

In an interview with Collider, Guillermo del Toro talks about his production schedule for 'Pacific Rim 2,' stating that the first draft of the screenplay is in now:

We are going to spend another 4-5 months on the screenplay before we start pre-production. We start pre-production next year in August-September and start shooting November-December next year.

But that's not all. While he didn't name names, he did tease that we'll see some (not all) of the characters from the first film, while others, well, we'll let him explain:

Some of your favorite characters come back, some others don’t because we have decided that we’re going to shoot ambitiously and say ‘Let’s hope we have three movies,’ so some characters come in at the end of the second, hoping that it will ramp up on the third one.

Del Toro is a director who notoriously keeps his plate loaded with projects. Right now, he's in post-production on 'Crimson Peak,' which hits theaters in 2015, and then there's always still the possibility of his 'Haunted Mansion' movie, which has long been a passion project for the director -- though that seems to always be percolating somewhere in the periphery. There's also that little black and white indie movie he mentioned wanting to make before 'Pacific Rim 2.'